Advice on starting the Western canon? I want to do the whole official list that Bloom writes out but I'm unsure if I'll be able to finish it given that he read for a job and could read like 400 pages an hour. I'm probably going to make a curated list off of the original one, but have it be a lot more than the 26 he chooses in his Western Canon book.
Anyone else start from Gilgamesh? I'm thinking of doing a blind reading first, not taking notes, just taking it all in and then the subsequent readings, having a notebook/Google Doc (haven't decided) for each book to detail my thoughts.
A big part of the Western canon for me is, aside from getting to know the greats, is finding ways to deepen my own writing. So having the notes done on subsequent readings can act as a way for me to study the prose and theme of 5000 years of history.
Where can I find Bloom’s list?
http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html
It's comically anglo-centered. Also, how is Catalan literature its own category?
>anglo-centered
Proof that translations aren't adequate as bloom was monolingual
His first language was Yiddish, not English.
And I'm sure that he spent hundreds of thousands of hours reading in Yiddish
He's monolingual.
Thank you god for making me an internet addicted autistic cringy moron BEFORE the advent of social media and normalized attaching your real name and face to everything and high resolution pictures meaning no plausible deniability and 98% of the human race being online and watching everything you do instead of 10% thank you thank you no one needs to know about that time in the Doom WAD sharing IRC channel where I told everyone about my fight with my mom or my various political and sexual self discovery experiments as an adolescent oh god thank you
same but I wish we had stayed in that comfy era
>my ancestor 🙂
>the raw egg drinker
he'll make it
Good luck to you anon. Bloom's Western canon has become a major life goal for me too, something I discovered consciously over the course of my undergrad degree in literature. It has informed my decision to study Classics at master's level next year. I have also decided that I plan to read everything in the original language and never read a translation again, (except when that translation has itself become a canonical classic, eg. the Rubaiyat translated by Fitzgerald). Due to my limitations as a language learner, I'm skipping the Sumerian/Sanskrit/Egyptian texts for now and don't have plans as yet for more eastern European or eastern countries' literatures in the Chaotic Age (Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Arabic, etc. Sorry). This is also because my main focus is on the first three ages, so my language learning will be spent on the languages of the literatures of the Democratic Age plus Latin and Greek, but I'll also be reading some Chaotic literature along the way because I enjoy it, but I feel far less obligation to complete it since it's not so obviously canonical. I'm also not planning any specific order except for gradated difficulty as I begin to learn each language -- so I'm starting with the simpler Greek texts now before I get to Homer, etc.
I don't know if I have any advice. I think I've been pursuing this plan consciously for about two years now, and I started with the English canon because it was related to my degree. I'm in it for the long haul but it's about the journey rather than the destination obviously. If I find other projects that's more immediately worthwhile or distracts me along the way I'll certainly pursue them, but at the moment I haven't got anything superior to this and I believe it's worth pursuing.
Good luck to you anon, I'm heavily more focused on ancient Greek and Indian philosophia and metaphysics than what Bloom offers but it's a comprehensive list although there is alot of Anglo thinking in there
Get the Iliad and the Odyssey translated by Robert gayles
homies really went from Yamnaya square jaws to THIS
the absolute state of dysgenics. All non-med europe should be nuked
He has a developed jaw and decent forward growth of the maxilla
he's like 10 y/o??? It's just babyfat, by the time he's 25 he probably will have gigachad profile